Mac-o-rama
Been probably two weeks or so since I switched to using the old G5 iMac as a primary home machine, and my only complaint is that it’s a bit on the pokey side. Opera and Firefox each sometimes go bonkers and try to eat the CPU, and Opera in particular is prone to stuttering. Now that I’m using Airfoil to transmit iTunes (and in theory other things) to the Windows box that has the real speakers attached things are pretty nice. Except for the bit where Airfoil itself chews ~15% of the CPU.
Which brings us back to “pokey”.
The new top-end iMac is looking pretty tempting. I’m still dubious about the merits of a 24″ display, and I didn’t really like the aluminium iMac they got me at work last year, but then again this is a dimmer environment with rather less natural light so the reflection issues may be moot. When the time comes — whenever that may be — I think I’ll have to go and look at one in a store and see how the display goes with my eyesight.
For anyone who has been living under a rock, the big deal with the new iMac refresh is that the top-end model (selling for about AU$3000) has a real GPU. A 512MB nVidia GeForce 8800GS. Much much better than the fairly dreadful low-end ATi parts they’ve been using previously.
They also top out at a 3.0GHz Core2 Duo CPU, and you can now specifiy a 1TB SATA disk. With the biggest disk and 4GB of RAM that’s almost AU$3700…
Which is an awful lot of money.
Australian tax law being what it is, it’s still cheaper to buy a Macbook Pro. Those don’t have anywhere near as spiffy a GPU — though they do have a “real” one — nor as fast a CPU, but they’re rather more portable. And start, effectively, at under AU$2k thanks to the ATO.
Perhaps waiting to see if the next Big Apple Event includes Yet Another MBP Refresh, as I am beginning to see some merit to a portable machine.
In other “news”, I finally got around to hitting our AppleTV with a patchstick today. After installing Perian and copying some font files over, it now plays DivX/XviD natively, with extra bonus big-arse subtitles. Which is exactly what we want.
The motivator was fairly simple: sometimes converting DivX/XviD->H.264 results in loss of A/V sync. Which is rather irritating and seems to happen regardless of the tools I use. Not having to do the conversion at all is a nice bonus but not really the point.
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